"MY FATHER CODED MONSTERS INTO OUR BLOODLINE—THEN LEFT ME TO DEBUG HIS SINS."
That was the first line on the cracked data-slate I found buried beneath ten feet of ash and dead cultivators.
I was twelve.
Now, at seventeen, I've rewritten the ending.
But back then? I didn't know shit about bloodlines. Just that mine was broken, trash-tier, untouchable. My veins held the mark of a line so cursed even the rats in the outer slums refused to bite me.
We were called the Nullborn—orphans left behind after the Great Sect Purge. No roots, no cultivation path, just meatbags waiting to starve or get harvested for scrap.
Until I found the Terminal.
It started when the sky turned black.
Not metaphorically—literally.
A war had broken out between the High Azure Sect and the Quantum Arcanum across the skies of Sector Twelve. Blue lightning clashed with fractal shields. Elders screamed incantations laced in code and chi, ripping holes in the sky, collapsing sectors like dominoes.
While they tore each other apart, I did what orphans do best.
I scavenged.
I crawled into the charred ruins of a fallen memory tower, half my body wrapped in cloth to ward off spiritual corrosion. Everyone else fled. I ran straight into the fallout.
And that's when I found it.
A sealed cylinder glowing with glyphs I couldn't read and code I couldn't parse. Black metal, humming like a dying beast.
THE ALCHEMIC DATACORE.
I shouldn't have touched it.
I definitely shouldn't have spliced it into my spinal port with scavenged wires from a fallen cultivator's gear.
But hunger makes you desperate.
And desperation makes you dumb.
The moment the core connected, it burned through me. My eyes bled. My bones twisted. My bloodline screamed as if a thousand ancestral ghosts were being force-fed fire.
Then I heard it—
"GENETIC SIGNATURE RECOGNIZED. NULL-TIER BLOODLINE DETECTED. INITIALIZING ROOT OVERRIDE."
My vision flickered.
And then I saw it.
Lines of shimmering red code, spiraling through my body like a corrupted script. My DNA laid bare. Every flaw. Every broken piece. Every limit.
"DO YOU WISH TO EXECUTE: RECOMPILE?"
I didn't even hesitate.
Yes.
I woke up three days later, half-buried under rubble, skin covered in alchemic sigils that pulsed like veins of light.
My body had changed.
Not strengthened.
Rewritten.
My chi flowed backward. My meridians formed recursive loops. I felt everything—and nothing.
I was no longer a cultivator.
I was a compiler.
A bloodline hacker.
They came for me that night.
Sect assassins in black robes. Faces hidden behind fractal encryption masks. Their blades weren't steel—they were strands of ancestral memory, sharpened into killing tools.
One spoke:
"Surrender the code. It doesn't belong to you."
I smiled.
"Neither did the bloodline you erased from history."
Then I triggered my first override.
GENE NODE #0 UNLOCKED: PRIMAL ADMIN ACCESS INITIATED.
Their blades shattered.
Their bones folded inward, as if denied the code that animated them.
I didn't kill them.
I unwrote them.
They called me a heretic.
A system bug.
A threat to the Nine Heavens Order.
I call it revenge.
You see, the clans think bloodlines are divine. Sacred. Fixed.
But they're not.
They're just code.
And I've got root access.